Internet Marketing and eCommerce Expert – Nigel Burke's Blog

The New York Times is expected to announce that they are going to start charging to read the news on their website. Nobody knows how much they are going to charge if they go ahead with it.

News Corporation recently blocked Google from indexing their articles and it seems they will be coming out with a paid model soon as well.

This is known as a paywall where you have to pay a subscription fee or a per article fee to read your news online.

It brings up an interesting question – Are you willing to pay to read the news online?

The research
Research figures around the Internet say that some people are willing to pay up to $3 a month to read the news online – which is currently free. It’s not a lot when people pay around $1 per day for a daily newspaper.

I guess people are more willing to pay something they can touch such as a newspaper than pixels on the screen.

Online advertising
If you have recently visited http://news.com.au, you will see advertising all over the place. It is getting more and more animated and in your face. Sometimes it takes over the entire screen!

If they are going to charge to read the news online, they will need to drop all the advertising. People will not pay if there are ads on the page.

Has the free-to-read advertising model stopped working? When was the last time you clicked on a banner from a news website. The advertising is usually very untargetted and the people visiting the website are there to read the news. Not to be sold products and services. If they were searching for something, they’d use Google or Yahoo.

Wrap Up
Are you willing to pay to read the news online? Do you think this new pricing model for newspaper websites work?

I do not believe they will get any more revenue from switching to this pricing model of a paywall. They might change back to the free model when they realise that not many people are going to pay to read the news online.

What are your thoughts?

Related posts:

1. iPad: Will it revolutionise the way we read magazines and newspapers? We have read and analysed the statistics – newspapers and...
2. Internet Marketing: Google Alerts – Monitor Your Name Online Imagine if there was a way where you could find...
3. Big W Opens Up Online Retail Store Big W has taken the plunge and entered into the...
4. Social Media Marketing News: Facebook Adds Conversion Tracker What is a conversion tracker? A conversion tracker is a...
5. What Is A News Reader? A news reader allows you to subscribe to your favourite...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.